They all dress pretty much the same in cities, villages and now in the desertification areas:

A small band fighting a rearguard action on the desertification front! I find this scene so typical of many others I have observed in many parts of China, Beijing, Dalian, Shandong, and now in 2010 Xinjiang!

These front line and quiet battles are fought by modest people who are paid grim wages to push the edges back just a bit at a time!

The image below is one of a set of brilliant photography by Big Picture, my all time favorite source of excellent and memorable images. It shows the current state circa 2010 of the monument in Shenyang memorializing the Mukden Incident which was the first action of WW II in SE Asia:

This was the flash point in Manchuria which lit into a savage Sino-Japanese conflict which is still ill-remembered in China, 79 years after that event.

Update 2010/11/17

I travelled to Shenyang by train two weeks ago. The day was overcast in Dalian, but our air seemed clear enough. I can’t say as much for the air within 100 kms of Shenyang (the city of Anshan) and in Shenyang. Dark, foul looking and not a pretty site!

Is that bad air a relic of Shenyang’s heavy industry past, or just a continuation of a malign and ghostly Japanese presence? The last time I flew into Narita Airport, this past February, its air looked and smelt clean. So what is it about Shenyang? I guess it’s just dirty Chinese industry!

Believe it or not Turpan is also a major producer of grapes and raisins for the rest of China. The native Xinjiangers speak a Turkic language and they have the same issues with the Han Chinese and the Chinese Govt that the Tibetans have.

That is truly an image of water under powerful natural pressure. The image was snipped from an LA Times story about the Three Gorges Dam on the powerful and very long Yangtze Jiang (River).

The article discusses the main +s and -s of that gigantic hydro-electric structure, and there is no lack of them. I was tempted to think that the journalists were being negative in the usual American MSM way about China and its oversized national image. But after reading the whole piece I realized it was an even handed report about the obvious limitations to extreme engineering projects.

I am very surprised that the Govt of China and Liaoning allowed international photographers to get these images. But it is kind of contrary programming when you consider how BP acted in the Gulf of Mexico. Dalian comes off with a better cleanup image than BP does!

Here’s some of the human cost of this cleanup in Dalian Harbor:

Scooping it out of the seawater was one way to get it cleaned up!

Even women were pitched into this battle with oil gunk on the beaches and in the water of the Bay of Dalian.

which is a web site maintained by a department of USC. To see a visual preview of The Family of Man just roll over the link!

The picture below led me to the collection I have linked to above.

I visited this part of Jilin Province with a China buddy, John Hunter McVay, who is still a China hand. I wouldn’t have gone there without him. But we didn’t get this view!

The few hours we were up on the ridge line were overcast with blasts of cold wind. So we saw nothing of the lake nor ot the calderon. It’s neat to get this image into my blog at this point of my renewed visit to China!